If you have longer ground connectors, then you end up removing all other
connections before the ground connection when you pull the HD, and you end
up connecting the ground connection first when you push the HD into the
system, theoretically removing all power spikes. Of course, that's just
the tip of how hot-swapping works.
I'd be more concerned with the integrity of the cache buffers. There's
cache on the drive, cache on the controllers, cache on the OS drivers and
*every* single one of them needs to be flushed before you disconnect the
drive! Well, flushing the cache on the drive is pretty simple since it's
still attached to the drive when you disconnect the drive, but the other
two aren't easy.
-Mark
--
Mark K. Kim
http://www.cbreak.org/mark/
PGP key available upon request.